At the 1995 meeting in Dayton, Ohio (at Wright State University) of the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations, Professor Howard A. Slaatte was scheduled to respond to the Plott Project in terms of his personal acquaintance with the man for about twenty years as a colleague at Marshall University.
In the absence of Dr. Slaatte, Loyd Swenson read Slaatte's response to Professor Gray's paper, after commenting that pycho-biography is important as long as Gray's caution about it is taken into account. Gray has written:
"Dr. Slaatte's paper will disclose some of John C. Plott's astounding eccentricities, some of which I either never knew of or never wanted to remember. I hope that my paper shows that the real significance of the Plott project is not to be confused with the also real eccentricities of its principal author and initiator. Whether the project exists in its unfinished but nevertheless imposing form because of or in spite of those eccentricities is a question which shall remain unanswered here. My intent has been to let the text of the project speak as much as possible for itself, but the Plott persona is so inextricably bound up in the Plott text that from time to time some comment on what is both a very personal and a very philosophical text has been necessary. So the relevance of Dr. Slaatte's paper is evident."
For about 20 years Dr. John Culpepper Plott was a professor of philosophy at Marshall University, Huntington, WV. A serious scholar, he was an asset to the faculty despite personal eccentricities of which his friends and acquaintances were well aware. My family was almost shocked when we first met him one summer day on the campus. He was clad in a bright multi-colored Hawaiian shirt and sandals, something we never suspected of a philosophy professor.
One of Plott's marked qualities was his enthusiasm for teaching and putting to work the library books. No only did he withdraw books for his own use but many for his students to study and report on. Toward the end of his time at Marshall University, Dr. Plott still had checked out over 400 books not previously accounted for. Intent on having his philosophy students to take these books seriously he literally distributed them to members of his classes while failing to keep records. He was simply too trustful. When the librarians finally decided to check up on the books, only a small number were located. The over-sized bill for the books proved far too much for Dr. Plott's pocketbook.
Plott was a typical bachelor, who often referred to his office as "the mole hole." It was located on the fourth floor of the Old Main classroom and office building, directly below the roof of a corner of the building. One of the more convenient forms of access thereto was a fire-escape on one outer wall of the building. Often late at night, a light was apparent from the mole hole when he put to work his short-wave radio. He listened to news programs and kept notes on random cards and papers, which he adapted to his work the Global History of Philosophy, his chief accomplishment.
One of Dr. Plott's graduate students was Paul Mays, who editorially organized the first volume, Sarva-Darsana-Sangraha: A Bibliographical Guide to the Global History of Philosophy, a volume of over 300 pages published in Leiden. This work covered many philosophers and philosophical systems from many countries, with special attention given to those of the Orient. An appendix was included of the projected 21 volumes of this project, a stupendous undertaking.
One of several faculty members at Marshall University who respected Dr. Plott was Dr. Mervin Tyson, long the head of the English Department. Dr. Tyson wrote the following descriptive statement: "After he retired, Dr. Plott continued to live in Huntington for several years. He was a devotee of the YMCA, where he found relaxation in swimming, and on many occasions he could be seen walking about the Marshall campus, his snow-white socks gleaming forth between the hems of his trousers and the tops of his shoes, his long rather sparse gray beard wafting in the breeze, and a rubber-banded pony-tail of his long back-hair bringing up the rear.
"Plott's declining years were marked by a nervous breakdown, a sad sight to contemplate. I recall on one occasion meeting him on campus when he suffered one of his sudden seizures. He was walking along, a few yards ahead of me, when he stopped short and became tense, his head undergoing an irregular sidewise and circular motion, his glaring eye staring to the sky. As I proceeded to come to his side, I greeted him quietly and spoke to him softly. Almost instantaneously he regained his composure and walked with me to the edge of the campus."
Being a strong idealist philosophically Dr. Plott was also a pacifist. Before and during the Vietnam conflict he was one of the first Americans to publicly repudiate our national involvement in Vietnam. On one occasion he stopped a bus load of young men on their way to Ashland, Kentucky, to register for the military. When Dr. Plott spoke to them one or more got off the bus, one of whom my family knew personally.
John Plott's mother was a piano teacher, who lived in Chickasha, Oklahoma during his time at Marshall University. His brother stopped by for a visit one time. He was as much of a military man as Dr. Plott was not.
Dr. Plott loved to get close to nature, especially in the autumn when the trees were most colorful. Sunday afternoons when my family and I were having dinner he often phoned saying he would like to have me drive him into the country to see the multi-colored leaves. Often I would accommodate him, but he seldom thanked me, if ever. Once I drove him to a state park about 60 miles south of Huntington. Quick to leave the car when we arrived, he headed for the concession stand. But he never treated his chauffeur. Was he selfish? No, only thoughtless about etiquette and similar things....
Once or twice at the mining town, Plott and I together worked to replace the weak roof of a small church. Dr. Plott was in some respects rather over-accommodating always leaving his office door unlocked, even as a rendezvous for romantic couples. Once I witnessed therein a Nietzschian student pick up Dr. Plott's grade book. He obviously thought he was clever to change his grades. I reprimanded him, reported him to the Dean, when he was not the slightest apologetic, whereupon he was ousted from the university.
I typically transported Plott to philosophy conferences in the state and beyond. One such morning he was late for our breakfast meeting. I knocked on his motel room door. Opening the door I found him standing on his head doing something special in Yoga. Otherwise he was a fast walker and a health food enthusiast. He liked Asian foods, and often when he received them he ate them, especially modified rice, with his fingers. Why? To be more authentically Asian.
After a few years of retirement Dr. Plott moved to Honolulu, Hawaii, where he enjoyed several intercultural experiences. A few years later he died there [1990], sometime after surgery at the University of Michigan Hospital.
Dr. Plott was an expendable person, who gave himself to a lifetime of study and research. While very much an individualist, he loved to serve his students and to work with colleagues of the faculty as well. As a Christian ethically he was often active in "the Friends," the Quaker society. More-than-average as a metaphysician he was ecumenical in every sense of the word and always concerned about improving social issues that affect society in general. In this respect his philosophy was as pragmatic as it was idealistic.
We became acquainted during my sabbatical leave at the University of Hawaii during the school year of 1963-64 and the summer session of the Fourth East-West Philosophy Conference where we met many of the top thinkers and writers in the comparative field, Charles Moore, Wing-tsit Chan, Hajime Nakamura, and D.T. Suzuki, among others. Nakamura and other prominent delegates to these East-West conferences have written prefaces for the Global History of Philosophy.
One day, between classes, Dr. Plott approached me about his vision for the creation of a work on the global history of philosophy. From that time, I was hooked. After we went our separate ways, we continued to exchange communications by mail and telephone, and I spent one summer assisting Plott in a seminar room in the Philosophy Department at the University of Hawaii.
One clear memory from that experience I would like to add to Dr. Slaatte's vivid profile of Plott. I had been in the habit of greeting colleagues in the morning with the usual greetings, amenities, jokes, comments on the weather or the state of the world. Dr. Plott quickly acquainted me with a different regimen. We scarcely acknowledged each other's presence for the first couple of hours of each work day. We read, studied, meditated, wrote, prayed, or thought our own not necessarily pious or serious thoughts during that early morning period. One thing we did not do was exchange any but the most essential talk.
Henry Rosemont is a distinguished authority on Chinese philosophy. When he was book editor for the journal Philosophy East and West, he encouraged the Plott project by printing some of the reviews I was doing of the first three volumes, before I joined the Plott team for Volumes IV and V. Once Rosemont told me that Dr. Plott was one of the most eccentric men he had ever known. Dr. Rosemont's friendly and appreciative cooperation with the Plott Project, along with his realism about Plott the eccentric, emboldens me to utter an aphorism for the wise: "Always strive to get past the eccentric to the genius." More explicitly, we "wise" readers are permitted to chuckle about the eccentric as long as we do not too long postpone benefiting from the mind of the genius.
Sometimes students are our best guides in getting beyond surface to substance in the case of an extraordinary person such as John C. Plott. In response to the present home page, Robert W. Ehman sent me a warm and friendly E-mail message encouraging me in helping continue Dr. Plott's work. "He gave me respect even though I had no idea why. I gave him respect because I feel he radiated sanity or maturity in a fatherly way. . . . I've had my computer three months and I've been looking for the good doctor ever since. I believe he's in a good place because he's a good man. I'm sure he was meditating on God when he left as my Father was - who once met him and liked him very much." (Feb 4, 1997, quotations rearranged somewhat for brevity's sake)